FriendFeed - anthonybailey 2014-12-29T01:06:51Z http://friendfeed.com/anthonybailey FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/static/apple-touch-icon.png?v=2fd0 Minutes from midnight The official calendar claims that from November 3 through January 26, Homestuck will update on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I’m not going to argue with the calendar. I mean, it’s got horses on it. However, our US Eastern time zone inhabiting author (well, not really) appears to be getting more and more eager to have those potatoes mashed and ready to eat by the very start of the day. 2014-12-29T01:06:51Z 2014-12-29T01:06:51Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:b2bebae1-e4e5-9e39-4f51-a44a6349a2e0
Anthony Bailey
Minutes from midnight The official calendar claims that from November 3 through January 26, Homestuck will update on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I’m not going to argue with the calendar. I mean, it’s got horses on it. However, our US Eastern time zone inhabiting author (well, not really) appears to be getting more and more eager to have... - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Minutes from midnight The official calendar claims that from November 3 through January 26, Homestuck will update on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I’m not going to argue with the calendar. I mean, it’s got horses on it. However, our US Eastern time zone inhabiting author (well, not really) appears to be getting more and more eager to have those potatoes mashed and ready to eat by the very start of the day.
Forum-quotable search 2014-12-26T02:53:00Z 2014-12-26T02:53:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:4ecbe91a-041e-735e-83dc-8462d026cff6
Anthony Bailey
Forum-quotable search - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Retconned branches, and passwords 2014-12-24T22:47:00Z 2014-12-24T22:47:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:cf4992f8-400c-3897-c648-d693bed2f90e
Anthony Bailey
Retconned branches, and passwords - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Prototype: Homestuck Act 1 SWFs I previously mentioned I’ve been playing with capturing SWFs, and that I was thinking about doing some kind of shot breakdown so I could refer to particular parts of Flashes in proposed data and maybe provide text descriptions for folk who can’t install Flash, in a marked-up way so different style of presentation or processing of the data is possible. I prototyped this for the thirteen SWFs (plus two retcons) in Act 1, listed here: http://readmspa.org/swfs/prototype I thought it wise to seek feedback before I start pinning down my conventions and ploughing through all 254 SWFs in the story. Is it useful? What should I do differently? Please tell me! 2014-12-20T02:10:19Z 2014-12-20T02:10:19Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:8c01a5a3-1623-73fc-f590-fc9f420e8b24
Anthony Bailey
Prototype: Homestuck Act 1 SWFs I previously mentioned I’ve been playing with capturing SWFs, and that I was thinking about doing some kind of shot breakdown so I could refer to particular parts of Flashes in proposed data and maybe provide text descriptions for folk who can’t install Flash, in a marked-up way so different style of presentation or... - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Prototype: Homestuck Act 1 SWFs I previously mentioned I’ve been playing with capturing SWFs, and that I was thinking about doing some kind of shot breakdown so I could refer to particular parts of Flashes in proposed data and maybe provide text descriptions for folk who can’t install Flash, in a marked-up way so different style of presentation or processing of the data is possible. I prototyped this for the thirteen SWFs (plus two retcons) in Act 1, listed here: http://readmspa.org/swfs/prototype I thought it wise to seek feedback before I start pinning down my conventions and ploughing through all 254 SWFs in the story. Is it useful? What should I do differently? Please tell me!
I made a tiny bugfix today: I realized that the “longest hiatuses” I list were all overstated by one day, so I fixed the code that generates those. But this prompts me to write on choices about real time and zones and Homestuck. thisis a dramantic pause calm ur tits OK, what is a hiatus anyway? That’s easy enough. hiatus hʌɪˈeɪtəs/, noun: a pause or break in continuity in a sequence or activity. Suppose Hussie were posting every day as used to be the norm. If he posts on Monday and then he posts on Tuesday, was there a hiatus? I say no. But if he posts Monday, skips Tuesday, then posts on Wednesday, then I count that as a one day hiatus. (Of course now he has a regular schedule that doesn’t involve posting every day, maybe that definition doesn’t make sense any more. But it won’t affect lists of longests, so let’s not worry unduly.) i guess im sorta used to it by now i dont think of hours going by the same way anymore But when was Monday anyway? This story gets published on the internet, and the world has timezones. I should use Hussie’s timezone (Eastern, UTC+5 outside of daylight savings), right? Well, except that his waking/working hours are rather later than usual. Looking across MSPA’s lifetime, it turns out to fit best if you count Hussie Standard Time as UTC+15, so that a day for Andrew starts and finishes at 10:00 in the morning Eastern time. Here’s a histogram of update frequency by Eastern hour: From first glance you might think from that the natural cut off would actually be more like 08:00 Eastern, but when you dig in pretty much all the 09:xx updates look like the last update from an all-night sessions rather than the first of several updates that day. There’s one other little nuance: to tie in with the occasional “Day nnn of Homestuck" annotations on key dates, you should then have the Hussie Standard Time day that started at 2009-04-12 10:00 EDT and on which he posted the first Homestuck page (at 2009-04-13 03:21 EDT) be numbered as Day Zero rather than Day One. 2014-12-18T02:31:45Z 2014-12-18T02:31:45Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:5f7bb9a5-85fb-878f-2768-cdd11edef8eb
Anthony Bailey
I made a tiny bugfix today: I realized that the “longest hiatuses” I list were all overstated by one day, so I fixed the code that generates those. But this prompts me to write on choices about real time and zones and Homestuck. thisis a dramantic pause calm ur tits OK, what is a hiatus anyway? That’s easy enough. hiatus hʌɪˈeɪtəs/, noun: a pause... - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Retconned branches, and passwords 2014-12-11T03:14:18Z 2014-12-11T03:14:18Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:bb4c68a1-88e3-0a67-448b-cd73d5dafb2c
Anthony Bailey
Retconned branches, and passwords - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Flashes are small 2014-12-08T03:25:17Z 2014-12-08T03:25:17Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:6e07c658-cc2d-cbfc-a62a-c5b35e2ff208
Anthony Bailey
Another visualization I like is this “Homestuck in five minutes” video by nostalgebraist It presents the story from beginning to the end at that time (basically up to DotA at the end of A6I2) in a "Panels: Fast forward until now" style. (I calculate it would be another 2:32 longer today.) As before, one reason for the refrance is that this presentation style could be a context for statistical visualizations: for example, sliding a vertical line marker along the horizontal axis of a graph could update the background image to represent where that point lives in the story. 2014-12-05T01:49:00Z 2014-12-05T01:49:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:574695c9-4ade-c322-f1f9-1d6f573b2785
Anthony Bailey
Another visualization I like is this “Homestuck in five minutes” video by nostalgebraist It presents the story from beginning to the end at that time (basically up to DotA at the end of A6I2) in a "Panels: Fast forward until now" style. (I calculate it would be another 2:32 longer today.) As before, one reason for the refrance is that this... - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Inspirations: LotR project One of the most famous websites to celebrate a literary work through data is LotR Project, Emil Johansson’s dedication to the books and world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Much of it is highly visual (e.g. the periodic table image above) and it looks very pretty on Tumblr because the creator has design skills. (I should get me some of those.) Since it honors a prose work, the project does care about the words in the stories. (By the way, even before we start adjusting for multimedia, a few weeks ago the raw word count of Homestuck finally rose above the 706,574 found in Tolkien’s entire mythos - with The Silmarillion and The Hobbit included.) But LotR project also gets much literal mileage from Tolkien’s maps. They make a very nice contextual space for visualization. The rings and spheres of Homestuck's multiverse would break any standard spatial chart, but the comic has another more abstract map and I suspect its structure and symbols would make a nice framing device for fancier visualizations of readmspa data. 2014-12-03T00:12:43Z 2014-12-03T00:12:43Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:f7734898-3bd0-3fc3-5ef6-49a95add4e25
Anthony Bailey
Inspirations: LotR project One of the most famous websites to celebrate a literary work through data is LotR Project, Emil Johansson’s dedication to the books and world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Much of it is highly visual (e.g. the periodic table image above) and it looks very pretty on Tumblr because the creator has design skills. (I should get... - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Inspirations: LotR project One of the most famous websites to celebrate a literary work through data is LotR Project, Emil Johansson’s dedication to the books and world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Much of it is highly visual (e.g. the periodic table image above) and it looks very pretty on Tumblr because the creator has design skills. (I should get me some of those.) Since it honors a prose work, the project does care about the words in the stories. (By the way, even before we start adjusting for multimedia, a few weeks ago the raw word count of Homestuck finally rose above the 706,574 found in Tolkien’s entire mythos - with The Silmarillion and The Hobbit included.) But LotR project also gets much literal mileage from Tolkien’s maps. They make a very nice contextual space for visualization. The rings and spheres of Homestuck's multiverse would break any standard spatial chart, but the comic has another more abstract map and I suspect its structure and symbols would make a nice framing device for fancier visualizations of readmspa data.
Changelog 2014-12-01T00:01:31Z 2014-12-01T00:01:31Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:a63ad100-417e-fe8c-e3e8-aab4c32f3072
Anthony Bailey
Plain Text Homestuck: Act 1 2014-11-28T00:16:20Z 2014-11-28T00:16:20Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:fb618eab-51a5-cbdb-a845-2cfb7c3eb259
Anthony Bailey
Plain Text Homestuck: Act 1 - http://pastebin.com/raw...
Idea: Data! Charts! Graphs! Updated! 2014-11-26T00:35:04Z 2014-11-26T00:35:04Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:c891b812-9cff-830f-6149-90c5e7731d20
Anthony Bailey
Idea: Data! Charts! Graphs! Updated! - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Measuring Homestuck (Data! Charts! Graphs!) 2014-11-26T00:10:30Z 2014-11-26T00:10:30Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:153028e1-c01d-dafd-3e2c-18a42533a46f
Anthony Bailey
Measuring Homestuck (Data! Charts! Graphs!) - http://www.mspaforums.com/showthr...
Putting words into people's mouths 2014-11-24T01:19:44Z 2014-11-24T01:19:44Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:c6af71ca-cb21-f52d-86a2-5f9500e8fb1e
Anthony Bailey
Putting words into people's mouths - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
One thing I’ve not represented properly in my own Homestuck data is which characters said what. But others have done it very well, and made nice visualizations. Here’s word cloud of Jake’s dialog by theorigamiphoenix. There are a bunch more for other characters, with interesting commentary. 2014-11-22T20:05:00Z 2014-11-22T20:05:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:6407d298-e1a9-512f-301b-5733603a04dc
Anthony Bailey
One thing I’ve not represented properly in my own Homestuck data is which characters said what. But others have done it very well, and made nice visualizations. Here’s word cloud of Jake’s dialog by theorigamiphoenix. There are a bunch more for other characters, with interesting commentary. - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
One thing I’ve not represented properly in my own Homestuck data is which characters said what. But others have done it very well, and made nice visualizations. Here’s word cloud of Jake’s dialog by theorigamiphoenix. There are a bunch more for other characters, with interesting commentary.
And a second nice visualization of Homestuck dialog is this video by Beat Bro (aka ionid981) showing how much the characters have talked with each other throughout the story. 2014-11-22T20:10:00Z 2014-11-22T20:10:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:0340072f-1393-cb77-4050-08c1b3249708
Anthony Bailey
And a second nice visualization of Homestuck dialog is this video by Beat Bro (aka ionid981) showing how much the characters have talked with each other throughout the story. - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Idea: Relate all the things 2014-11-21T01:29:00Z 2014-11-21T01:29:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:a7b3acae-d988-1b68-0a42-32219bd05900
Anthony Bailey
Idea: Relate all the things - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Idea: Describe all the things 2014-11-19T01:57:36Z 2014-11-19T01:57:36Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:f03cbbd7-1ac8-2983-8457-5455d1e1f896
Anthony Bailey
Idea: Describe all the things - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Idea: a proper search engine 2014-11-17T01:19:00Z 2014-11-17T01:19:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:bec92a32-bc8c-8cc6-0930-60cbff11a337
Anthony Bailey
Idea: a proper search engine - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Ideas: context 2014-11-17T00:58:00Z 2014-11-17T00:58:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:1f760072-e8e6-5563-bc60-30bb3394337c
Anthony Bailey
Minor and abstract spoilers 2014-11-15T13:53:25Z 2014-11-15T13:53:25Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:5518e672-8223-6601-f660-9ebd604bf3b7
Anthony Bailey
Minor and abstract spoilers - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Data: what a daring dream 2014-11-12T00:58:00Z 2014-11-12T00:58:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:ea6cc6b1-55cb-7a42-1809-72779784f4ad
Anthony Bailey
Data: what a daring dream - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
A little local history 2014-11-09T19:51:16Z 2014-11-09T19:51:16Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:551516e3-9c61-ed4b-cf60-663125d12d94
Anthony Bailey
A little local history - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Retcon: project history 2014-11-06T00:48:00Z 2014-11-06T00:48:00Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:057083ad-a37d-62b8-66cf-0c7fd1176f27
Anthony Bailey
Retcon: project history - http://readmspa.tumblr.com/post...
Nested tic-tac-toe is neat. This “Math with Bad Drawings"... 2013-06-29T14:24:38Z 2013-06-29T14:24:38Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:75ba5724-db70-c38c-e85f-fc37de68a986
Anthony Bailey
Nested tic-tac-toe is neat. This “Math with Bad Drawings"...
Nested tic-tac-toe is neat. This “Math with Bad Drawings" post is a good overview. This playable version at Khan Academy is fun, and pleasantly open if you want to mess with the code. - Anthony Bailey
Re: Impossible Programs: a great lecture on some of computer science's most important subjects 2013-05-31T20:50:25Z 2013-05-31T20:50:25Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:16b1da59-8242-0388-3cf3-4d6b58ab535e
Anthony Bailey
Re: Impossible Programs: a great lecture on some of computer science's most important subjects - http://boingboing.net/2013...
"I agree that this is a well-presented talk! But I disagree with the other opinion expressed in the original post. The wonderful thing about the halting problem is that although it is a deep result that reveals something very interesting and fundamental about general purpose computation, it *isn't* very difficult to understand. The argument is surprisingly simple. (Also: there was one part of the "coping strategies" section at the end of the talk that I think is misleading. Tom implies that if you want to know whether some interesting property holds for a program you have written, you have to live with inexaustive tests, or some other kind of approximation to certainty: that you can't ever prove it for sure. Not so. For a particular interesting true property of a particular program you wrote, it probably *is* possible to model that property and prove it formally for that program. The reasons for not doing so are pragmatic ones - it's usually much more trouble than it is worth, and you..." - Anthony Bailey
Charles Nutter on predictably shaped dynamic types 2013-05-11T13:44:35Z 2013-05-11T13:44:35Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:e4758d88-4897-de32-3613-51b83aa6df71
Anthony Bailey
Charles Nutter on predictably shaped dynamic types
On Languages, VMs, Optimization, and the Way of the World He reckons to allow a runtime to be efficient: “types don’t have to be statically declared, but they need to be statically defined. Most popular dynamic languages do neither, but all they really need to do is the latter.” As per my comment there, I wonder whether it could be useful for a collection of objects in a dynamic language to be able to signal to the runtime “OK, I promise that we’re done being unpredictable. You can start making assumptions about our shape now.” Because, it seems many of the benefits of monkeying with a dynamically typed language come early in the run, at the point you set everything up; they enable nicer embedded DSLs, more expressive configuration. Then there comes a point where you could say “freeze”. - Anthony Bailey
Why literate programming failed: stories and encapsulation 2013-05-05T13:19:58Z 2013-05-05T13:19:58Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:5b1e6743-b7f8-dd37-5118-d20b144ab496
Anthony Bailey
Why literate programming failed: stories and encapsulation
Reading a related question re putting tests inline with code on Ars Technica, discussion got onto why Knuth’s literate programming technique (“LP”) never gained popularity. The cost is complexity, so the question reduces to why the real-world value of benefits of LP weren’t as much as expected. My take: LP is about documenting code as a narrative story with a beginning and an end. It was invented when describing procedural code, before encapsulated objects were the norm. Telling the tale of one algorithm is easy enough, but it takes artistry to do the same for a composed system. It is like describing a country by interweaving little stories about its citizens. They give writing awards to people who do that well. Something analogous holds for story threads and parallel processes. Lastly, the code that needs the best documentation is that with the most external users: frameworks and libraries. As well as tending on the non-procedural and parallel, in these cases most readers don’t even... - Anthony Bailey
Funniest xkcd in a long while. 2013-03-13T21:37:41Z 2013-03-13T21:37:41Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:fdbe2f40-db54-4e96-991f-f6aea231a7d1
Anthony Bailey
Funniest xkcd in a long while.
Funniest xkcd in a long while. - Anthony Bailey
Re: Introducing Mandroid, Google's remasculating new operating system 2013-02-27T17:37:37Z 2013-02-27T17:37:37Z tag:friendfeed.com,2007:4c68f743-c30f-b337-559f-3d8468476fce
Anthony Bailey
Re: Introducing Mandroid, Google's remasculating new operating system - http://boingboing.net/2013...
"+1. Mr Beschizza, I feel compelled to explicitly applaud your fine joke, in case you fear it is too obscure to be worthwhile. It may be somewhat obscure. It is still worthwhile. My laugh was out loud." - Anthony Bailey